Very gratifying have been the winter semester of 2005-06 spent as an invited professor at the University of Heidelberg and the summer semester of 2006, also as invited professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Both stays gave me the opportunity to appreciate the ways in which the status of Geography has changed in the country where our specialty had its birthplace as a scientific discipline.  

Anxiety about the future of Geography as a formative discipline in high schools and universities has replaced the conviction that Geography would always be an integral part of the curricula of the middle and higher levels of education. Departments of Geography have been closed down for budgetary reasons or obsolescence in the thematic contents, and traditional geography courses are being replaced by ecology-oriented courses. Publishing houses which specialized in the discipline have closed down and respected geographical journals have been substituted by a host of magazines published in English.

 A lively debate has been ignited as to the reasons of this decline. Some analysts blame it on a damaging split between human and physical geography that led to the abandonment of the regional paradigm. In fact today in Germany less regional courses are taught at universities than in the years when I was a student there. The number of textbooks on regional or continental subjects has also considerably decreased. Still, Germans continue to be curious travelers and avid readers of travel accounts and popularizing books on environmental deterioration, climate change, or historical landscapes. These preferences will probably keep alive, at least for a while, the general interest in works that are categorized as geographical reading. On this side of the Atlantic, we can only lament that the Europeans, who consider Anglo America as the trendsetter, are following in our footsteps